The Red Book (28 page)

“I didn’t realize I did until this afternoon,” says Mia. Sometimes, she thinks, it takes someone who knew you back when to illuminate the missing you here and now, a black light beamed over invisible ink, a fresh set of eyes that haven’t witnessed the decades of self-deception, a new set of ears that were not privy to the steady, insistent drumbeat:
I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

A few paces behind, Bucky drapes a proprietary arm around Clover. “Shall we go for another round tonight?” he whispers in her ear, but now that she has the two things she wanted from him (proof of past love; grade-A sperm), she finds herself not only indifferent to his overtures but slightly concerned by them.

“Bucky,” she says, gently but firmly removing his arm, “I had a great time, don’t get me wrong, but you’re married. And I’m married. Happily at that.” She knows how odd this must sound, in light of the events of the past twenty-four hours, but she needs to make it clear that last night was a one-off. Or a two-off, if you count this morning, which she’s already transformed in her head—and therefore in the future biographical record of Clover Love, circa 2009—from something deeply arousing and enjoyable into a necessary semievil whose sights, smells, and details she will either try to erase from her memory or take with her to her grave, although the former, she realizes, might be difficult, considering the product of that event might be (God willing) a daily presence in her life. After talking to Danny this afternoon, listening with spousal pride, admiration, and love to his tales of Guantánamo and gastronomical woe—his prisoner was still imprisoned; the only place to eat within walking distance of the prison was a Subway sandwich shop—she felt so queasy with guilt or perhaps pregnancy hormones that she called Zabar’s and had them overnight two gift baskets, one for his client, Abdullah, the other for Danny and his legal team.

Not that a chocolate babka, two dozen bagels, and a pound of coffee beans could ever erase the stain of her infidelity, but they sure went a long way toward appeasing Clover’s guilt over it.

“Got it,” says Bucky, who’d spent the whole afternoon thinking he should divorce Arabella and marry Clover, the one person, if he’s being honest with himself, he ever truly loved. “Say no more,” he says, finding it suddenly difficult to swallow. He’ll never understand women, he decides. Really. Never.

Addison watches this brief exchange between Bucky and Clover from five feet back and thinks, oh my God, they totally did it last night, and now she’s blowing him off, but because Bennie and Katrina are simultaneously giving her the third degree about Gunner’s whereabouts, she files the information away for future pondering. When Clover’s blue-eyed, dark-haired baby boy, Frank, is born nine months later, the spitting image of Danny, but also, let’s be honest, Bucky, with a perfect dash of Clover’s caramel melanin and Giacometti limbs, Addison will be the only one of Clover’s friends to question, albeit privately, little Frankie’s paternity. She will not judge her for this, nor will she ever confront her with her suspicions, and, in fact, her ability to process the ambiguity without either gossip or resorting to its binary categorization as either good or bad, right or wrong, will help give her the strength of conviction and acceptance of life’s deckled edges she will soon need to process not only her marriage to Gunner but also the inauthenticity of her own path.

“So vait,” says Katrina to Addison, her accent turning the
w
in
wait
to a
v
. “Since lunch you have not seen him? But then vere did he go?”

“Back to New York,” says Addison, trying her best to sound blasé. “He sent me a text.” She pulls out her iPhone and locates Gunner’s most recent text—“on bus to nyc”—which hovers in a gray iPhone conversation bubble under another pithy nugget—“can’t make it”—which he’d sent the previous Monday, without further explanation, when he decided on a whim to catch a Russ Meyer film at the Film Forum he claimed was tangentially related to his novel instead of coming to hear Thatcher’s end-of-the-year choral presentation, as promised. (“It’s just a friggin’ choral concert,” he’d said, in response to Addison’s fury over his missing it. “He’ll do another one at Christmas.” To which she’d countered, spit flying, “You could have Netflixed
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
, you fucking asshole.”)

“That’s it?” says Bennie. “ ‘on bus to nyc’?”

“Yup, that’s it.” Gunner’s first novel had been praised by a number of male critics for the emotional barrenness of its language, as if that were an asset. Female readers, on the other hand, were unmoved by the book, one of them going so far as to give it the ultimate insult on a well-trafficked book blog: She “flung it across the room.” (“Bullshit,” Gunner had said when he read this. “No one actually flings a book across a room. Who are all these people flinging books across rooms?” Addison, who at that very minute was holding in her hands 320 bound pages of self-indulgent lad lit she was berating herself for having been duped by the hype into buying, flung it across the length of their bedroom.)

She told him if he ever wanted to have a larger audience, or at least an audience of the great unpenised, he’d have to give his readers the subtextual nuance—pain, joy, fear, love,
feelings
for heaven’s sake—underlying his characters’ physical traits, actions, and words, as opposed to just the traits, actions, and words themselves devoid of emotional context. That didn’t mean he had to resort to mawkish sentimentality, but a quick glimpse, now and then, inside the multilayered morass of his characters’ hearts—being a visual artist, she really didn’t care about his page-long descriptions of moles, eyelashes, nose widths, and lip dimensions, preferring to imagine all those minute physical details on her own, as part of the fun—would do his writing (and him, for Christ’s sake) a world of good. “Well, what if their hearts are empty?” he’d said.

“Then show me that emptiness,” said Addison. “Make the reader
feel
it.”

Incredible, she thinks, that she ended up not only with a man but with a man whose I-love-yous she can count on one hand. “I don’t believe in saying ‘I love you,’ ” Gunner frequently responds, whenever Addison begs him for some small scrap of affection. “It’s become a cliché. You know I love you, so why should I have to say it?”

But she doesn’t know he loves her. She can’t even be sure that he likes her. Or if she likes him.

Bennie wants to ask Addison many more questions, to probe deeper into the seemingly sadistic dynamics of her ex-lover’s marriage, but they’ve arrived at the door of the Spee Club, and she can already see Addison shutting down, stepping into her phone booth, turning into SuperAddison, untouchable and unflappable. “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in,” says Addison, tap-tap-tapping the brass bear-shaped knocker against the door, not realizing Ludwig Von Arnhem is right behind her, key in hand.

“Shouldn’t that be ‘Little bears, little bears’?” says Ludwig, cracking only himself up as usual. In college, his sense of humor was so legendary for its lack of humor that the
Lampoon
had published a six-panel cartoon entitled “The Biting Wit of Ludwig Von Arnhem,” each frame containing an increasingly hysterical Ludwig spouting non sequitur nonsense (“I have one word for you: aluminum!”; “Who’s afraid of Virginia ham?”) to a silent, unchangingly blank-faced listener. Ludwig, still laughing at his unjoke, is about to stick his key into the red Spee Club door when it swings open, revealing three undergraduate club members, still on campus for whatever reason (summer school? summer jobs? reunion workers?), standing defensively in the vestibule in their studiedly unstudied rumpled oxfords and jeans.

“I don’t know,” says Addison, staring at the barely postpubescent young men, with nary a hair on their chinny-chin-chins. “Do these dudes look like bears to you? They’re more like puppies.
Saplings
.” She downed three gin and tonics at the party. She’s feeling right at that perfect, unbridled peak between sobriety and social embarrassment.

“Excuse me, but can we help you?” says one of the students, a tawny-haired, green-eyed, dazzling-toothed specimen of youthful zest, utilizing every one of his well-trained vocal and facial muscles of politesse while blocking the door with his get-the-fuck-out-of-here stance.

The two groups stand face-to-face, mirror images of one another distorted by a gulf of two decades, each feeling superior to their time-warped counterpart for reasons only the older group can fathom. The current students see the pasty alumni and think poor, sad, balding sacks, trying to relive their long-gone youth. The alumni—who know exactly what the young ’uns are thinking, thank you very much, giving them the ironic advantage in this hall of mirrors standoff—see the current students both as they appear today and as they will one day become, as if witnessing it all in stop-motion flash forward: the disappointments, the broken vows, the friends and family laid to rest; the loves lost, the pounds gained, the compromises and the sad surprises and the football-size lemons swallowed whole.

“Ludwig Von Arnhem, class of ’89,” says Ludwig, holding up his key in his left hand while offering his right for a sturdy handshake. “Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of your hair.”

“Oh, sorry, dude, didn’t realize you were a member,” says the student, who shakes Ludwig’s hand before taking a deferential step back with his young compatriots.

“Jay-sus!” says Clay—loudly, for kicks, with as much southern twang as he can muster without sounding like an extra in
Deliverance
—as the group passes through the vestibule into the formal foyer, presided over by a massive, taxidermied bear. “So this is where all the haves dug into their beef tenderloins while us have-nots were chowing down on chickwiches in the cafeteria. Not that I don’t love me a good chickwich now and then, but dang, check this place out.” He stares down at the marble floor, up at the chandelier. “I hope ya’ll appreciate what you got here.”

He addresses this last statement, rhetorically—they can’t hear him, The National is cranked up too loud—to the small group of students in the billiards room across from the bear, where a young woman holding a pool cue leans slowly over the table, spilling cleavage onto green felt. Mia stares at her chest—I mean, really, it’s
impossible
not to, and the girl knows it—and thinks, good lord, if only I’d been that beautiful at her age, my life would have turned out so differently. Not better, necessarily, just different.

Clover looks at her and sees the effortlessness of her movements, her comfort with the phallic pole, no doubt the result of having grown up in wood-paneled rooms just like this one. She wonders if it’s possible to get a pool table up the stairs of her brownstone, or will it have to be hoisted through the window? She wonders how much longer she can afford the mortgage on that window or even the staff to clean it without gainful employment. Seven months she’s been out of a job. Seven months! At her level, managing director, in her area of expertise, mortgage-backed securities, there are simply no openings, nor will there be, she fears, for years. But what else can she do? She’s never done anything else, never worked anywhere else aside from Lehman. Maybe Danny’s right. Maybe they should suck up the loss of having bought at the height of the market—the irony of her own house being underwater is not lost on her—and sell the nearly fully renovated brownstone in Carnegie Hill to buy something cheaper, using the difference as a cushion against the dismal economy while she tries to figure out chapter two of her life, plus how much does a nanny cost anyway, $700 a week minimum, right? And then of course yearly private school tuitions, or so her friends with kids tell her, are now inching their way up to forty grand: more than twice what her own tuition at Harvard would have been, had she not received financial aid. How do people who aren’t in her field even do it? It’s unfathomable.

Addison looks at the young woman and thinks, I used to be you. Taut. Unlined. Entitled. Certain that the combination of my pedigree and a Harvard diploma would lead me to greatness without effort, and yet this morning I woke up naked and bleeding in jail, with nothing to show for the past two decades aside from some mediocre paintings of my hairbrush, a husband who loathes me, and three kids whom I’ve unquestionably already fucked up.

Jane stares at the display of cleavage and wonders how many men, aside from her husband, will be privy—after she’s married, before she’s dead—to those tits.

In fact, the girl’s heaving chest has captivated nearly all of them, some of the men to the point of tumescence. One, pretending to check e-mail, surreptitiously snaps a photo of the milky mounds with his iPhone, which he will longingly stare at that night, after his wife passes out, while pleasuring himself in the bathroom.

Jonathan decides the only solution is to look elsewhere. Bucky is remembering, with intense relish, last night’s spectacular romp with Clover. Ludwig Von Arnhem is wondering if there’s any way he can ditch the Russian chick he brought with him, more as a conversation piece and ego buttress than as good company, to try his hand at seducing the breasts’ owner. It’s becoming harder for him to bed the younger ones these days, but he’s got enough going on in the bone structure and wallet department that he’s still able to close the deal on occasion. This newest object of his seemingly bottomless desire is about to knock the eight ball into the far left corner pocket when one of the young men grabs hold of the purple thong sticking out the back of her low-slung jeans, and the cue ball goes flying. “Fucking hell, Antonio,” she says, playfully. “You are
such
a douchebag.”

“All the better to clean that nasty shit out,” says her tormentor, who now lifts up the girl with a single hand to her crotch, flings her over his shoulder, and starts spinning her around to the tom-heavy beat of “Brainy,” a show of deliberate bravado meant to dissuade the old leches drooling over his occasional score from even trying.

“Put me down, Antonio! Oh my God, put me down!” she says laughing, gripping the back of the boy’s Brooks Brothers shirt for dear life.